LOS ANGELES — Concerns about climate change and its impact on the world around us are growing daily. New scientific studies at the La Brea Tar Pits are probing the link between climate warming and the evolution of Ice Age predators, attempting to predict how animals will respond to climate change today.
Earth
University of Adelaide researchers have found that women on antidepressant medication are more successful at breastfeeding their babies if they keep taking the medication, compared with women who quit antidepressants because of concerns about their babies' health.
These results have been presented this week at the 18th Perinatal Society of Australia and New Zealand (PSANZ) Annual Conference in Perth.
Because M. gentilis still lives today (as is the case with most insects excavated from the tar pits), the team linked records of its restricted climatic range to late Ice Age environmental conditions at Rancho La Brea which suggest that M. gentilis lived in a moderately moist (mesic) environment that occurred at a lower elevation during the Late Pleistocene. The identification of nest cell leaf fragments, which were collected in close proximity to the nest site, indicate a nearby wooded or habitat with a stream or river.
Drastically improved efforts to provide modern energy access to the poor opens up a new approach to development efforts and action on climate change, an international group of energy and environment scholars say in a new report, Our High-Energy Planet. The report is the first of three in the Climate Pragmatism project, a partnership of Arizona State University's Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes (CSPO) and The Breakthrough Institute.
UC Santa Barbara physicist Tarun Grover has provided definitive mathematical evidence for supersymmetry in a condensed matter system. Sought after in the realm of subatomic particles by physicists for several decades, supersymmetry describes a unique relationship between particles.
Oyster aquaculture in the Potomac River estuary could result in significant improvements to water quality, according to a new NOAA and U.S. Geological Survey study published in the journal Aquatic Geochemistry.
Using a laser to place individual rubidium atoms near the surface of a lattice of light, scientists at MIT and Harvard University have developed a new method for connecting particles — one that could help in the development of powerful quantum computing systems.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Picture this: A massive asteroid almost as wide as Rhode Island and about three to five times larger than the rock thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs slams into Earth. The collision punches a crater into the planet's crust that's nearly 500 kilometers (about 300 miles) across: greater than the distance from Washington, D.C. to New York City, and up to two and a half times larger in diameter than the hole formed by the dinosaur-killing asteroid.
By changing row-crop management practices in economically and environmentally stable ways, US farms could contribute to improved water quality, biological diversity, pest suppression, and soil fertility while helping to stabilize the climate, according to an article in the May issue of BioScience.
It can be found in toothpaste, solar cells, and it is useful for chemical catalysts: titanium dioxide (TiO2) is an extremely versatile material. Alhough it is used for so many different applications, the behaviour of titanium oxide surfaces still surprises. Professor Ulrike Diebold and her team at the Vienna University of Technology managed to find out why oxygen atoms attach so well to tiny step edges at titanium oxide surfaces. Electrons accumulate precisely at these edges, allowing the oxygen atoms to connect more strongly.
Recently, dark matter hunters from around the world gathered at the University of California, Los Angeles for "Dark Matter 2014." The annual conference is one of the largest of its kind aimed at discussing the latest progress in the quest to identify dark matter, the unknown stuff that makes up more than a quarter of the universe yet remains a mystery.
So where does the hunt stand? Between sessions, three leading physicists at the conference spent an hour discussing the search for dark matter on several fronts.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Researchers from Brown University and universities in China have found a simple technique that can strengthen steel without sacrificing ductility. The new technique, described in Nature Communications, could produce steel that performs better in a number of structural applications.
This knowledge is of particular interest for producers, since changes in the grape directly affect the chemical composition of the must.
Nanoengineering researchers at Rice University and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have unveiled a potentially scalable method for making one-atom-thick layers of molybdenum diselenide -- a highly sought semiconductor that is similar to graphene but has better properties for making certain electronic devices like switchable transistors and light-emitting diodes.
Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have achieved a major breakthrough in the development of methods of information processing in nanomagnets. Using a new trick, they have been able to induce synchronous motion of the domain walls in a ferromagnetic nanowire. This involved applying a pulsed magnetic field that was perpendicular to the plane of the domain walls. "This is a radically new solution," explained Professor Mathias Kläui of the Institute of Physics of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.